Gartner Magic Quadrant

I was pleasantly surprised last week when I read the latest Gartner report, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service, Worldwideand found that our aPaaS, AppScale was prominently mentioned. The “Magic Quadrant” series of reports are important because of their reach to enterprise IT, so our Marketing Team is all smiles and high-fives. It is unusual for a start-up to be mentioned in these reports, so we are grateful that our innovation, hard work and worldwide traction is being recognized.

Of course, you always want more. In this case, I would have liked a bit more depth in the analysis of AppScale, but that’s OK. I will take the opportunity now to explain why we created AppScale, the problems we solve for customers, our relationship with Google and our vision for the future. Buckle up.

Google launched App Engine to the public in 2008, which immediately caught the eye of Dr. Chandra Krintz, Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. App Engine was the publicly available version of the brilliantly simple, api-driven, application development platform (aPaaS) that Google used to build Google. That’s quite a pedigree. The “higher-level of abstraction” that the model affords, allows developers to focus on the business logic of the application as opposed to the fussy web service details like authentication, datastore, taskqueue, memcache, search and urlfetch. Why waste valuable developer time writing code that already exists?

The goal of the App Engine “model” is to allow rapid development of web and mobile apps; to enable quick MVP’s that companies could bring to market fast and then iterate until successful or not. The notion of “failing fast” is not a cliche, but a first-class precept of contemporary software development. Couple this innovation in software development with the virtually infinite resources of Google that can autoscale, up and down, with the demands placed upon the application and the magic really starts to happen.

So, it is no surprise that some of the most recognized, high-flying innovators have embraced Google App Engine. SnapChat has built their colossal success on the back of Google App Engine. 100 million active daily users “snapping” 9,000 times per second, automatically scaling up and down, responding to the demands of its users. Udacity is expeditiously delivering education to the four-corners of the globe leveraging the rapid-development App Engine model and supporting its students with the flawless delivery of curriculum through the Google network. Spotify has joined the Google team and continues to revolutionize how music is delivered and consumed using Google. But also, old-school innovators like Sony, Disney, Coke, Motorola, Avery-Dennison, Briggs and Stratton, Chico’s FAS and Scotts Miracle-Gro have transformed how they do business by using the App Engine. Why? Because they get more productivity and more revenue with less time and less money.

AppScale is the perfect companion to App Engine. AppScale is an open source implementation of App Engine, which means that you can take your App Engine application that now can only run in a Google data center and have the freedom to run it anywhere that makes sense for your business; AWS, Azure, IBM/SoftLayer, Aliyun (in China) or on your on-premise resources. Why this is important is that now you can quickly develop your web and mobile applications in the most cost effective and efficient manner using the App Engine model developed by Google, but deploy your application on any cloud, anywhere in the world. Powerful stuff. More to come.

This is Part 1 of a Three Part series on AppScale and the Gartner Magic Quadrant.